Monday, November 11, 2013

One Week Becomes Two

Ah, blog drag. It's a thing, and I'm going to take this opportunity to appreciate the fact that my small (but loyal! and well-loved!) readership means that I get to take breaks when I don't have much to say without causing as much crisis as it would if I was a big name blogger.

I'm in a bunch of middles; I don't think there's anything from the last few weeks that has stuck with me long enough to talk about (at least, not that I don't have a plan for posting about--Sarah, I'm talking about The Tightrope Walker!). So, just a quick rundown of my in-the-middle-ofs.

1) Mary Roach's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It's really good, but I think that Mary Roach is better when she's looking at the places where science and culture intersect. So this book is better than Packing for Mars, but not as good as StifforSpook. I enjoy her loving treatment of the scientists who study these things, though, and it's still a Mary Roach book, which means it brings charm and wit, and that I now know why we use the terms flammable and inflammable interchangeably, and why (probably) mythology contains fire-breathing dragons..

2) Nancy Werlin's Unthinkable. Not as good as Impossible, and with a much less comfortable premise. Fanella is cursed with immortality until she commits three acts of destruction that hit very close to home. It's kind of emotionally frustrating--heartbreaking, and never quite addressing head-on the fact that, if this is the no-win situation it appears to be, it was stupid, blindly made decisions that got us here.

One thing that's driving me crazy, though--and it's the most inane thing--is that the company that I work for does business under the name Fanilla, Inc. So whenever I pronounce her name to myself, I'm lifted out of the story and into a scenario where I'm perusing my paycheck. Just...weird. Like dating someone with the same name as your dad.

3) Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. I have many thoughts on fandom about this one, but it's about to get back-burnered in favor of the book club selection; I fully intend to come back to this one. I'm enjoying it SO much.

There's more: random library pickups (Love You Hate You Miss You), Netgalleys that aren't holding my attention (Palace of Spies), a really good high fantasy novel that I'm just realizing doesn't come anywhere near passing the Bechdel Test (Mistborn: The Final Empire). But I don't have much else to say right now. I'll see what happens when my opinionated kicks in--or maybe just my excitement over the next batch of reads.